The situation that worries me relates to distribution packaging. Debian has a policy that deltas to packages in the stable repository should be as small as possible, targetting fixes by backporting patches from newer releases.

If you get a bug report on your Debian package with a link to a commit on GitHub, you had better double check that this commit really did come from the upstream author and hasn’t been spoofed in this way. Even if it shows it was authored by the upstream’s GitHub account or email address, this still isn’t proof because this is easily spoofed in git too.

The best defence against being caught out by this is probably signed commits, but if the upstream is not doing that, you can clone the repository from GitHub and check to see that the commit is on a branch that exists in the upstream repository. If the commit is in another fork, the upstream repo won’t have a ref for a branch that contains that commit.

Python 2 will sunset on January 1st 2020 – however, many applications have not yet upgraded to version 3, causing the coding lingo's team to mount a communications campaign to persuade devs to port their code.

Python is the third most popular programming language after JavaScript and Java, according to Redmonk. Its use has been boosted by the strong interest in machine learning, for which Python is well suited, thanks in part to its various AI-related libraries and frameworks.

Python 2.0 was released in 2000, and Python 3.0, which is not fully backwards compatible, in 2008. The last version of Python 2.x, 2.7, was released in July 2014.

Monday was the first day of Akademy BoFs, group sessions and hacking. There is a wrapup session at the end of the day so that what happened in the different rooms can be shared with everyone including those not present.

KDE Frameworks, the continuation of the “kdelibs” bundle of libraries, but with emphasis on modularization, is now at API-compatible major version 5. Yet one can find legacy API already deprecated in version 3 times, but done so only as comment in the API dox, without support by the compiler. And while lots of API is also properly marked as deprecated to the compiler, the consumer has no KDE Frameworks specific option to control the warnings and visibility. While some “*_NO_DEPRECATED” macros are used, they are not consistently used and usually only for deprecations done at version 5.0.

As you surely are aware, currently the foundations of the next generation of Qt, version 6, are sketched, and with the end of 2020 there even exists a rough date planned for its initial release. Given the API breakage then happening the same can also be expected for the libraries part of KDE Frameworks. And which would be a good time to also get rid of any legacy cruft.

CAT Interstellar, a rather short sci-fi "walking sim" that I quite enjoyed after playing it back in 2017 has now gone 100% free to grab.

Speaking about it going free on Steam, the developer noted that they never actually expected it to make any profit. However, they did manage to ship around 100k units across Steam, Humble Bundle and the Playstation Store although most were from sales and bundles.

What they did with that money is quite sweet though. Grossing around $8k a year across four years, the majority of it went to fostering animals and donating to their "local humane society". They never really promoted that until now when it's free, as they thought it would have been a "sleazy sales tactic".

You all love benchmarks right? Hearing the fans on your PC spin up to keep everything inside nice and cool while you start to sweat. Geekbench 5 has been officially released this month.

One of the big additions is Vulkan support in the GPU Compute Benchmark, along with some new tests included there to run too including "computer vision tasks such as Stereo Matching, and augmented reality tasks such as Feature Matching".

They also added some additional CPU benchmark tests too including "machine learning, augmented reality, and computational photography". Primate Labs also said they increased the "memory footprint of existing workloads" to account for the effect of that on CPU performance. Also added is a bunch of new multi-threaded benchmark modes and so on.

Lead a team of heroes through a dark fantasy world in Sin Slayers, out officially now with Linux support. Note: Key from their PR team.

Borrowing some ideas from the seven deadly sins, in Sin Slayers you're tasked with taking down the seven in a place known as the Valley of Fallen Sinners. It's a mix of turn-based RPG styled combat with elements of roguelikes and dungeon crawlers to create a curious mix.

So, you’ve just finished learning the basics of Python. The question now is, what do you do now? How can you continue to keep developing your coding skills using Python? Do you carry on watching tutorials, or is there something better you can do? The answer is yes there is something better, and that something is working on your own python project. So, here are 6 small Python projects you can do as a beginner.

The past month and a half we have been putting CompuLab's Airtop 3 computer through some demanding benchmarks and a variety of endurance workloads. With the Airtop 3 under test loaded with an 8-core / 16-thread Xeon processor, NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics, and 64GB of RAM with NVMe SSD storage there were some concerns over thermal throttling and if this fan-less industrial PC design could really deal with the generated heat. But after all of this testing, the Airtop 3 continues running strong and another shining example of CompuLab's engineering strength.

While Windows may be the world's most popular Operating System (OS) for desktop PCs, the world's most popular OS for the internet's web servers is Linux.

Usually bundled along with Apache, MySQL, and PHP - and frequently referred to as a LAMP configuration - a wide variety of different Linux distros are used.

Sometimes it's down to personal preference, sometimes market forces, and sometimes due to small advantages a particularly distro will have in regards to the core applications to be used, security concerns, or stability issues.

Ultimately, most web users will never notice any difference because the OS works very much in the background, and it will only be the system administrators and IT managers who take notice of which distro of Linux is used.

While the agencies will no longer maintain or update the CONNECT wiki, it will continue to exist as an open source project whose code and community resources can be "used, adopted and implemented by any interested organization."

[...]

CONNECT is an open source software and community project, jointly developed 10 years ago by FHA and ONC as another way to harness the expertise of software developers and promote interoperability across the U.S. healthcare system.

GnuCash is a personal and small business finance application, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. It’s designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible. GnuCash allows you to track your income and expenses, reconcile bank accounts, monitor stock portfolios and manage your small business finances. It is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports.

GnuCash can keep track of your personal finances in as much detail as you prefer. If you are just starting out, use GnuCash to keep track of your checkbook. You may then decide to track cash as well as credit card purchases to better determine where your money is being spent. When you start investing, you can use GnuCash to help monitor your portfolio. Buying a vehicle or a home? GnuCash will help you plan the investment and track loan payments. If your financial records span the globe, GnuCash provides all the multiple-currency support you need.

Python 3.5 has now entered "security fixes only" mode, and as such the only changes since Python 3.5.4 are security fixes. Also, Python 3.5.8rc1 has only been released in source code form; no more official binary installers will be produced.

MATLAB® is widely known as a high-quality environment for any work that involves arrays, matrices, or linear algebra. Python is newer to this arena but is becoming increasingly popular for similar tasks. As you’ll see in this article, Python has all of the computational power of MATLAB for science tasks and makes it fast and easy to develop robust applications. However, there are some important differences when comparing MATLAB vs Python that you’ll need to learn about to effectively switch over.

[...]

Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language designed for ease of use by human beings accomplishing all sorts of tasks. Python was created by Guido van Rossum and first released in the early 1990s. Python is a mature language developed by hundreds of collaborators around the world.

Python is used by developers working on small, personal projects all the way up to some of the largest internet companies in the world. Not only does Python run Reddit and Dropbox, but the original Google algorithm was written in Python. Also, the Python-based Django Framework runs Instagram and many other websites. On the science and engineering side, the data to create the 2019 photo of a black hole was processed in Python, and major companies like Netflix use Python in their data analytics work.

There is also an important philosophical difference in the MATLAB vs Python comparison. MATLAB is proprietary, closed-source software. For most people, a license to use MATLAB is quite expensive, which means that if you have code in MATLAB, then only people who can afford a license will be able to run it. Plus, users are charged for each additional toolbox they want to install to extend the basic functionality of MATLAB. Aside from the cost, the MATLAB language is developed exclusively by Mathworks. If Mathworks were ever to go out of business, then MATLAB would no longer be able to be developed and might eventually stop functioning.

You are working at a lower league football stadium and you’ve been asked to automate the scoreboard.

The referee will shout out the score, you have already set up the voice recognition module which turns the ref’s voice into a string, but the spoken score needs to be converted into a pair for the scoreboard!

In addition to AMD's open-source Linux driver developers being busy in recent weeks bringing up the Renoir APU support, today we've seen the first baby steps towards bringing up "Dali" as another upcoming AMD APU.

The Dali codename has been known for a few months now and has been expected to be a value/mobile APU to launch in 2020. Dali is expected in more budget devices while Renoir should carry better performance up the stack.

The next-generation AMD "Renoir" APU is turning into being an interesting successor over the existing Picasso APUs. While at first it was a letdown finding out that the APU is based on Vega and not their newer Navi architecture, follow-on open-source Linux patches have continued to show that it's more than a facsimile and in some areas like display and multimedia has blocks in common with Navi.

It's been interesting to watch the Renoir APU Linux driver support form since the initial patches last month and more code continues to come out almost weekly for getting this initial support into shape for the Linux 5.4 kernel.

The VK_IMG_format_pvrtc Vulkan extension has been around but not publicly document. This extension exposes additional texture compression features specific to Imagination PowerVR texture compression formats (PVRTC). There had been this two year old issue report over the VK_IMG_format_pvrtc extension not being public and they had been unable to provide the documentation over legal grounds. Earlier this year Imagination did provide a PVRTC texture compression user guide and now with Vulkan 1.1.122 they have finally documented this extension. The extension documentation is basically pointing out a number of different enums.

Kubernetes lets us orchestrate containers, but how do you track your container images? That's where Quay comes in. It enables you to keep a handle on not just your images but the configuration details you need to get a complete application up and running. Now, Red Hat is releasing Quay 3.1 to enable developers to mirror, store, build, and deploy their images securely across diverse enterprise environments and to leverage several new backend technologies.

This follows up on May's Quay 3.0 release. That version brought support for multiple architectures, Windows containers, and a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)-based image to this container image registry.

PureOS is Purism's in-house developed operating system based on the well-known Debian GNU/Linux OS, which the company is currently deploying on all of their Librem laptops, as well as the Librem 5 smartphone. Until now, PureOS was delivered only as a rolling release where you install once and receive updates forever.

However, due to the privacy and security-focused Librem 5 Linux phone, which will start shipping to customers on September 24th, the company decided to create a stable version of PureOS that contains well-tested components for a rock solid release, without any bleeding-edge software, which may not always work as intended.

Lightbend has recently announced CloudState. Created by the team behind Akka, Play and the Reactive movement, CloudState is the first open source serverless framework designed to bring stateful management on Knative/Kubernetes stack.

Up to now the LLVM compiler stack has been used when wanting to target the Linux's eBPF in-kernel virtual machine while now the port for the GNU Compiler Collection has been deemed in good enough shape and merged.

Oracle developers can be thanked this time as it's their crew that nursed the GCC eBPF port into shape.

The GCC eBPF port is roughly equivalent to the capabilities of targeting eBPF from LLVM/Clang. There are some missing bits of functionality but they plan to get to that with time.

Pulumi has launched version 1.0 of its modern infrastructure as code platform. The latest version introduces new capabilities designed to help developer and operations teams overcome organizational silos and achieve productivity, reliability and security on any cloud using familiar programming languages and open source tools and frameworks.

For the end-of-year internship period some of the projects on the table include integrating Jenkins with GitHub apps, fixing lock-related warnings within the Linux kernel, better displaying a JSON schema within Firefox, and various other possible projects.

Women and other under-represented groups in tech can apply to Outreachy. The stipend for the Outreachy internship period is at $5,500 USD plus a $500 travel stipend.

My name is Kelsey Skunberg and I am starting my senior year for my Undergraduate in Computer Science at Colorado State University. This summer, I had the honor of participating in the Linux Kernel Mentorship Program through CommunityBridge. Throughout the mentorship, I grew very fond of working on open source projects, learned to work with the open source communities, and my confidence as a developer has grown tremendously.

Since the beginning, I found the Linux kernel community to be very welcoming and willing to help. Many of the developers and maintainers have taken time to answer questions, review patches, and provide advice. I’ve come to learn contributing is not quite as scary as I first anticipated. It’s ok to make mistakes, just be open to learning and new ideas. There are a lot of resources for learning, and developers willing to invest time in mentoring and helping new contributors.

[...]

I chose to work on PCI Utilities and Linux PCI with Bjorn Helgaas as my mentor. Bjorn has been an incredible mentor who provided me with a great amount of advice and has introduced me to several tools which make the development process easier.

Sysdig is doubling down on its efforts to make its open source Falco project the de facto means for pulling security metrics for runtime security and intrusion detection. The company has already contributed Falco to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and has hired Kris Nova, a CNCF ambassador who worked for Heptio (now part of VMware) and Deis (now part of Microsoft). Nova is also credited with developing kubicorn, an infrastructure management tool for Kubernetes.

Together with my colleague Bettina Bassermann and SUSE partners, we will be running a series of blogs and webinars from SUSE (Software Development, Microservices & Container Management, a SUSE webinar series on modern Application Development), and try to break the ice about Microservices Architecture (MSA) and Cloud Native Application Development (CNA) in the software development field.

Yaru theme might get a full light theme (and a full dark theme that already exists, but with further refinements) instead of the mixed theme that's currently default in Ubuntu.
While users have been voicing their opinion about the need of using a fully light theme with Ubuntu by default, that's not why there are talks to have a Yaru light theme. Instead, it looks like there are issues with the headerbar buttons lack of contrast compared to the background, and this is where the Yaru Light idea comes from.
Feichtmeier, a Yaru theme contributor, sums up the issues with using a mixed theme (light theme with dark headerbar), including in the argument that Gtk is not ready for an inverted headebar, and that "in a normally lightened room at day the dark headerbar is worse usability wise than a light headerbar", also adding that basically all platforms or toolkits use a full light or full dark theme for day/night.